A Novel Secure Transmission Scheme in MIMO Two-Way Relay Channels with Physical Layer Approach

Abstract

Security issue has been considered as one of the most pivotal aspects for the fifth-generation mobile network (5G) due to the increasing demands of security service as well as the growing occurrence of security threat. In this paper, instead of focusing on the security architecture in the upper layer, we investigate the secure transmission for a basic channel model in a heterogeneous network, that is, two-way relay channels. By exploiting the properties of the transmission medium in the physical layer, we propose a novel secure scheme for the aforementioned channel mode. With precoding design, the proposed scheme is able to achieve a high transmission efficiency as well as security. Two different approaches have been introduced: information theoretical approach and physical layer encryption approach. We show that our scheme is secure under three different adversarial models: (1) untrusted relay attack model, (2) trusted relay with eavesdropper attack model, and (3) untrusted relay with eavesdroppers attack model. We also derive the secrecy capacity of the two different approaches under the three attacks. Finally, we conduct three simulations of our proposed scheme. The simulation results agree with the theoretical analysis illustrating that our proposed scheme could achieve a better performance than the existing schemes.